2.3 / User Interface Enhancements
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
mikeo, he might be referring to the discussion following my suggestions here:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2280#p17723
Split screen
mikeo, he might be referring to the discussion following my suggestions here:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2280#p17723
Split screen
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Yeah, unfortunately Apple only lets us set one name for a given In-App Purchase so we have to use that name on iPad even though it's not actually fulllscreen. Though there is an option in Settings / Panels to make it actually fullscreen on iPad if you really want a gigantic drawing area.
Also the interface from our old Palm/WM software, more or less; for "power users" it probably is better than the default interface, but if you're a random App Store browser downloading every free Chinese dictionary you can find you're going to be even more likely to dismiss it as "too complicated" than with our default interface.
On iPhone or only on iPad? Like a lot of iPad software developers I'm somewhat blown away by the new sliding-section Twitter for iPad interface (even if you're not a Twitterer it's worth downloading just to look at it - works fine without a Twitter account), so I could easily see moving Char Info to a drag-dismissable sidebar on the right side of the screen, but I don't know how we'd work it on in iPhone without making it really tiny.
Sichuanese audio would be extremely difficult to commercialize, so it's the sort of thing that I think would be most likely to appear as a free or academic project. Actually that would be a neat idea for an open-source project if anybody's interested in starting a Chinese-related one, build up a database of words / sentences recorded by speakers of many different dialects; might also serve a need for a higher-quality free Chinese audio database, but the main focus would be on giving Chinese learners outside of China a way to get exposed to a lot of different dialects / speech patterns that they wouldn't be otherwise; you shouldn't have to wait until you get to China to start learning how to tell the difference between actual "si"s and "shi"s that sound like "si"s.
The arrow keys should probably be optional, but they make it easier to go through entries sequentially than tapping on the list - some people like to scroll through all 30 or 40 results for a search one-by-one, so we wanted to keep the buttons for that from our two-screen default interface. That scroller button has been somewhat controversial - it would probably be best to just replace it with a drag-alphabet on the right side of the screen like you see in so many other places on iPhone, though that unfortunately doesn't scale too well to a list with 200,000 items in it.
No, we try to be fairly careful about privacy - we don't even use Flurry or another statistics-gathering package like that to track regular app usage, the only time we collect your device information is when you buy something (so that we can locate your order in our database later if you need us to) or when you contact us for support via the built-in "Contact Support" button.
Gato's link is correct, here's the relevant bit:
Very possible, though one thing I'm still not sure about: what would we want to do with the open keyboard / HWR / etc input in that case? Would we want to close it, or leave it open but bring up history in a separate popup screen? (maybe history should always be in that screen anyway)
Entropy said:
Yeah, unfortunately Apple only lets us set one name for a given In-App Purchase so we have to use that name on iPad even though it's not actually fulllscreen. Though there is an option in Settings / Panels to make it actually fullscreen on iPad if you really want a gigantic drawing area.
Entropy said:
Also the interface from our old Palm/WM software, more or less; for "power users" it probably is better than the default interface, but if you're a random App Store browser downloading every free Chinese dictionary you can find you're going to be even more likely to dismiss it as "too complicated" than with our default interface.
Entropy said:
On iPhone or only on iPad? Like a lot of iPad software developers I'm somewhat blown away by the new sliding-section Twitter for iPad interface (even if you're not a Twitterer it's worth downloading just to look at it - works fine without a Twitter account), so I could easily see moving Char Info to a drag-dismissable sidebar on the right side of the screen, but I don't know how we'd work it on in iPhone without making it really tiny.
Sichuanese audio would be extremely difficult to commercialize, so it's the sort of thing that I think would be most likely to appear as a free or academic project. Actually that would be a neat idea for an open-source project if anybody's interested in starting a Chinese-related one, build up a database of words / sentences recorded by speakers of many different dialects; might also serve a need for a higher-quality free Chinese audio database, but the main focus would be on giving Chinese learners outside of China a way to get exposed to a lot of different dialects / speech patterns that they wouldn't be otherwise; you shouldn't have to wait until you get to China to start learning how to tell the difference between actual "si"s and "shi"s that sound like "si"s.
Entropy said:
The arrow keys should probably be optional, but they make it easier to go through entries sequentially than tapping on the list - some people like to scroll through all 30 or 40 results for a search one-by-one, so we wanted to keep the buttons for that from our two-screen default interface. That scroller button has been somewhat controversial - it would probably be best to just replace it with a drag-alphabet on the right side of the screen like you see in so many other places on iPhone, though that unfortunately doesn't scale too well to a list with 200,000 items in it.
Entropy said:
No, we try to be fairly careful about privacy - we don't even use Flurry or another statistics-gathering package like that to track regular app usage, the only time we collect your device information is when you buy something (so that we can locate your order in our database later if you need us to) or when you contact us for support via the built-in "Contact Support" button.
mikeo said:
Gato's link is correct, here's the relevant bit:
mikelove said:
mikeo said:
Very possible, though one thing I'm still not sure about: what would we want to do with the open keyboard / HWR / etc input in that case? Would we want to close it, or leave it open but bring up history in a separate popup screen? (maybe history should always be in that screen anyway)
character
状元
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
I think part of the problem is the results aren't ordered by frequency, as far as I can tell, hence the need to scroll and scroll and scroll. Presumably, those further along with Chinese can make more precise searches.
I don't know if specialized Pinyin drag alphabet would be useful. I think I suggested a while ago having 'jump' buttons to go to the next/prev tone (i.e. xia1 -> xia2), next/previous pinyin (xia->xian), that sort of thing.
mikelove said:
I think part of the problem is the results aren't ordered by frequency, as far as I can tell, hence the need to scroll and scroll and scroll. Presumably, those further along with Chinese can make more precise searches.
I don't know if specialized Pinyin drag alphabet would be useful. I think I suggested a while ago having 'jump' buttons to go to the next/prev tone (i.e. xia1 -> xia2), next/previous pinyin (xia->xian), that sort of thing.
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
If some space is stolen from the input field (perhaps optionally) to put a history button to its right, then if I understand your question, you're asking whether the keyboard would be visible simultaneously with history?
I'm thinking the keyboard would disappear as it does now when history is displayed, and reappear (if it was displayed when history was invoked) when history is "cancelled".
mikelove said:
If some space is stolen from the input field (perhaps optionally) to put a history button to its right, then if I understand your question, you're asking whether the keyboard would be visible simultaneously with history?
I'm thinking the keyboard would disappear as it does now when history is displayed, and reappear (if it was displayed when history was invoked) when history is "cancelled".
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Um, it's free. Complexity can't be a *dis* incentive if the cost is nothing. Well, it could, but it could also be an asset.
On iPhone. Isn't this an iPhone thread?
Seriously, I think that a quarter of that can be devoted to SOD. But, to make room for that, I'd want to shrink the English font in the definition pane, and I can't figure out how to do that. "Entry display" "text body" doesn't seem to be the right setting.
I have to say, a lot of the names are really cryptic. What's a "search result"? How does it differ from an "entry display"? &c.
I was also thinking of only one character in the SO pane, but now I think it could hold at least four--it's 1" by 1" in portrait. In landscape, I think it could hold 5 characters across at the default size for the top of the existing RH panel. That's enough for most of my purposes, but I'm still happy to have an iPad that could show dozens. Now if only you can get Pleco on iPhone to send its images over to the iPad for real-time HWR.
(Actually, now I wonder whether a hardware camera, either BT or dock connector, could be made to work. On the iPhone, developers have access to custom hardware that they build for themselves (like the iAudioInterface) and now third parties have access to other people's hardware. I have a camera connection kit and know it works with the Griffin iMic USB interface, and I wonder whether there are cheap USB webcams that use no drivers. And the iPod is metal--if it's flat enough, there are already magnetic macro lenses out there, and those kits include a stick-on magnetic ring for plastic devices. But that's really a topic for another thread, eh?)
That has some promise--it's certainly cool to play with--and is better done than other apps that use similar ideas, like Amazon and the Weather Channel. But I'd like it *much* more if I could adjust the overlap like I would with windows on my computer. (In fact, I'd be happiest if someone figured out how to do overlapping windows well on an iPad, since that way I could adjust the space to suit me, instead of suiting whatever the developer had in mind.) And, some of the tabs completely cover up the ones under them, which means the user only wonders why there's an extra row of pixels at the edge of his pane.
But as a long-time Mac user, I still think that allowing the user to divide up the space *exactly* as they want is the best approach. This is why I still use Eudora--I can put every window exactly where I want it, and hide windows (like the mailbox list) I never need to see. Especially on a small device, I don't want you wasting any of *my* space, for example by putting things there that you think are useful, like the dictionary picker, rather than what I think is useful, like the history button.
(BTW, the reason I want the history button to be persistent is that I want to set the app to open the keyboard at launch, but I don't *always* want to use the keyboard--usually, but not always.)
I don't know how well the Twitter interface would work on iPhone, and on iPad you have plenty of space without it.
Steve Dorner added that to Eudora years ago (by which I mean, years before development stopped) and it was extremely useful. I would write him saying, Steve, why do you do this ridiculous thing instead of this other thing I suggested, and he'd say Well, because 97% of our users do that ridiculous thing for more than half of the CPU time they're using. For example, do you know what percentage of your users use the up/down buttons? Do you know how often users open the app and immediately open the keyboard (and which keyboard do they prefer?) rather than doing something else, and does that change depending on the modules they have installed? Do you know how often the users change to the two-column view, and how often they change *back*? Do you know the average length of a search string, or of the definitions returned by the most common searches? &c.
~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
mikelove said:
Um, it's free. Complexity can't be a *dis* incentive if the cost is nothing. Well, it could, but it could also be an asset.
Entropy said:
mikelove said:
On iPhone. Isn't this an iPhone thread?
Seriously, I think that a quarter of that can be devoted to SOD. But, to make room for that, I'd want to shrink the English font in the definition pane, and I can't figure out how to do that. "Entry display" "text body" doesn't seem to be the right setting. I have to say, a lot of the names are really cryptic. What's a "search result"? How does it differ from an "entry display"? &c.
I was also thinking of only one character in the SO pane, but now I think it could hold at least four--it's 1" by 1" in portrait. In landscape, I think it could hold 5 characters across at the default size for the top of the existing RH panel. That's enough for most of my purposes, but I'm still happy to have an iPad that could show dozens. Now if only you can get Pleco on iPhone to send its images over to the iPad for real-time HWR.
(Actually, now I wonder whether a hardware camera, either BT or dock connector, could be made to work. On the iPhone, developers have access to custom hardware that they build for themselves (like the iAudioInterface) and now third parties have access to other people's hardware. I have a camera connection kit and know it works with the Griffin iMic USB interface, and I wonder whether there are cheap USB webcams that use no drivers. And the iPod is metal--if it's flat enough, there are already magnetic macro lenses out there, and those kits include a stick-on magnetic ring for plastic devices. But that's really a topic for another thread, eh?)
mikelove said:
That has some promise--it's certainly cool to play with--and is better done than other apps that use similar ideas, like Amazon and the Weather Channel. But I'd like it *much* more if I could adjust the overlap like I would with windows on my computer. (In fact, I'd be happiest if someone figured out how to do overlapping windows well on an iPad, since that way I could adjust the space to suit me, instead of suiting whatever the developer had in mind.) And, some of the tabs completely cover up the ones under them, which means the user only wonders why there's an extra row of pixels at the edge of his pane.
But as a long-time Mac user, I still think that allowing the user to divide up the space *exactly* as they want is the best approach. This is why I still use Eudora--I can put every window exactly where I want it, and hide windows (like the mailbox list) I never need to see. Especially on a small device, I don't want you wasting any of *my* space, for example by putting things there that you think are useful, like the dictionary picker, rather than what I think is useful, like the history button.
(BTW, the reason I want the history button to be persistent is that I want to set the app to open the keyboard at launch, but I don't *always* want to use the keyboard--usually, but not always.)
I don't know how well the Twitter interface would work on iPhone, and on iPad you have plenty of space without it.
mikelove said:
Steve Dorner added that to Eudora years ago (by which I mean, years before development stopped) and it was extremely useful. I would write him saying, Steve, why do you do this ridiculous thing instead of this other thing I suggested, and he'd say Well, because 97% of our users do that ridiculous thing for more than half of the CPU time they're using. For example, do you know what percentage of your users use the up/down buttons? Do you know how often users open the app and immediately open the keyboard (and which keyboard do they prefer?) rather than doing something else, and does that change depending on the modules they have installed? Do you know how often the users change to the two-column view, and how often they change *back*? Do you know the average length of a search string, or of the definitions returned by the most common searches? &c.
~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Single-character Pinyin searches are, at least in CC/PLC/ABC - what sorts of searches do you often find yourself digging through lots of results for?
That might actually be an interesting replacement for the current scroll bar, a showable/hideable overlay (on the side of the screen) to page between Pinyin syllables - not sure how useful that would be either, though.
That makes sense, though a popup view might also work well.
Complexity means you give up and download a different free Chinese dictionary; the whole business justification for giving away the basic app for free is to persuade people to buy our many wonderful add-ons, so if someone downloads Pleco and gives up on trying to use it after 5 minutes because it's too complicated then we're not going to have the opportunity to sell them stuff.
Even on the combined list/definition interface you're now using? That's like a 1/2 inch square - pretty difficult to see a stroke order diagram squeezed into that little space. "Definition body" is the correct setting, so I'm not sure why it's not resizing correctly...
Yes indeed - Settings needs a major revamp.
That's a bit more workable than sticking them in the main definition, but I don't really like putting them in a square - that's not how people are actually going to see the word, so it feels like we're jamming in a lot of information where it doesn't want to go. I do like the idea of making an entire headword accessible through Char Info, though - maybe through a nice simple left/right sliding gesture. We're certainly hoping Bluetooth inter-device communication will be reliable enough in iOS 4.2 to allow us to implement some sync features like that (using the iPhone as a remote OCR camera for an iPad might also be interesting), but no promises there until we get a chance to put 4.2 through its paces.
Expensive, though - if someone else develops one we could certainly send some customers their way, but I don't think it's realistically within our ability to customize our own hardware just to implement OCR on a subset of iDevices.
Fair point, but we actually had quite a bit of criticism when we made the toolbars in Pleco 2.0 more customizable than in 1.0 at the expense of some clever automatic adjustments - for example, you could hide / show the entry list on the side of the screen in that version with a button tap, and when you hid it the toolbar would get a couple of up/down scroll arrows which would disappear again when you brought the list back; little behaviors like that are very very difficult to support with a fully-customizable toolbar system.
But we are pushing to make the toolbars more customizable, it just takes a lot of work / testing since we have to deal with buttons being visible / usable in situations where they hadn't been before, and we have to make sure Pleco operates cleanly / doesn't crash in those cases - the what-do-we-do-with-the-keyboard-when-you-tap-on-history question above being a typical example.
Makes sense - so you sometimes open up Pleco specifically because you want to remember that word you looked up a few hours / days ago?
Many of those questions assume users know enough to change options from their defaults - the two-column view might be more popular if it were easier to find, and a lot of people might like having the keyboard visible on startup. But aside from making the options screens clearer I'm not sure how we get them to discover those options exist; a "wizard" is an absolutely awful idea on iPhone - if someone downloads your app you want them to be up and running with it within ~10 seconds of when they get it (so you'd better damn well make sure that whatever dictionary you licensed has an entry for "nihao," even if many current dictionaries exclude it because it's linguistically debatable whether or not it's actually a word).
Collecting average search lengths / common searches would be a huge privacy violation - we regularly get emails from people desperately asking for help clearing their search histories because of the embarrassing words they've looked up with them - and while I suppose we could make that an opt-in thing, I suspect that that requirement might distort the results somewhat. (as would be true with any of these options, actually - people agreeing to statistics gathering could be just as self-selected a group as people who email / post / etc their feedback)
Thanks for all of your comments - always fun when someone new signs up on here and starts posting lengthy / thoughtful suggestions.
character said:
Single-character Pinyin searches are, at least in CC/PLC/ABC - what sorts of searches do you often find yourself digging through lots of results for?
character said:
That might actually be an interesting replacement for the current scroll bar, a showable/hideable overlay (on the side of the screen) to page between Pinyin syllables - not sure how useful that would be either, though.
mikeo said:
That makes sense, though a popup view might also work well.
Entropy said:
Complexity means you give up and download a different free Chinese dictionary; the whole business justification for giving away the basic app for free is to persuade people to buy our many wonderful add-ons, so if someone downloads Pleco and gives up on trying to use it after 5 minutes because it's too complicated then we're not going to have the opportunity to sell them stuff.
Entropy said:
Even on the combined list/definition interface you're now using? That's like a 1/2 inch square - pretty difficult to see a stroke order diagram squeezed into that little space. "Definition body" is the correct setting, so I'm not sure why it's not resizing correctly...
Entropy said:
Yes indeed - Settings needs a major revamp.
Entropy said:
That's a bit more workable than sticking them in the main definition, but I don't really like putting them in a square - that's not how people are actually going to see the word, so it feels like we're jamming in a lot of information where it doesn't want to go. I do like the idea of making an entire headword accessible through Char Info, though - maybe through a nice simple left/right sliding gesture. We're certainly hoping Bluetooth inter-device communication will be reliable enough in iOS 4.2 to allow us to implement some sync features like that (using the iPhone as a remote OCR camera for an iPad might also be interesting), but no promises there until we get a chance to put 4.2 through its paces.
Entropy said:
Expensive, though - if someone else develops one we could certainly send some customers their way, but I don't think it's realistically within our ability to customize our own hardware just to implement OCR on a subset of iDevices.
Entropy said:
Fair point, but we actually had quite a bit of criticism when we made the toolbars in Pleco 2.0 more customizable than in 1.0 at the expense of some clever automatic adjustments - for example, you could hide / show the entry list on the side of the screen in that version with a button tap, and when you hid it the toolbar would get a couple of up/down scroll arrows which would disappear again when you brought the list back; little behaviors like that are very very difficult to support with a fully-customizable toolbar system.
But we are pushing to make the toolbars more customizable, it just takes a lot of work / testing since we have to deal with buttons being visible / usable in situations where they hadn't been before, and we have to make sure Pleco operates cleanly / doesn't crash in those cases - the what-do-we-do-with-the-keyboard-when-you-tap-on-history question above being a typical example.
Entropy said:
Makes sense - so you sometimes open up Pleco specifically because you want to remember that word you looked up a few hours / days ago?
Entropy said:
Many of those questions assume users know enough to change options from their defaults - the two-column view might be more popular if it were easier to find, and a lot of people might like having the keyboard visible on startup. But aside from making the options screens clearer I'm not sure how we get them to discover those options exist; a "wizard" is an absolutely awful idea on iPhone - if someone downloads your app you want them to be up and running with it within ~10 seconds of when they get it (so you'd better damn well make sure that whatever dictionary you licensed has an entry for "nihao," even if many current dictionaries exclude it because it's linguistically debatable whether or not it's actually a word).
Collecting average search lengths / common searches would be a huge privacy violation - we regularly get emails from people desperately asking for help clearing their search histories because of the embarrassing words they've looked up with them - and while I suppose we could make that an opt-in thing, I suspect that that requirement might distort the results somewhat. (as would be true with any of these options, actually - people agreeing to statistics gathering could be just as self-selected a group as people who email / post / etc their feedback)
Thanks for all of your comments - always fun when someone new signs up on here and starts posting lengthy / thoughtful suggestions.
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
I just found an Apple text entry bug from Mac OS 9 or earlier (and all versions of OS X) is still present on iOS 3.2. Try to bring the cursor before the 'B' in the next paragraph. If the bug is real, you won't be able to do that, so you can't paste at the beginning of the line. Now put it in the blank line and try to move it forward. Just like in OS 9 with arrow keys, it moves to the space after the B. Think about that when you ask Apple to fix a bug for you.
[
BTW, one of the other tools I've found useful ion helping to recognise characters is "Chinese Word Search Pro" which can be limited to food and drink terms. (By drink they mean flavored coffees, which is really annoying to have to deal with while playing the game.) I wonder if something like that would be a useful adjunct to flashcards (which I never use because I would have to write them--nobody seems to have a dictionary of food words except the late James McCawley, and while I aspire to typing every entry in _The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters_ into my iPad, I never actually get around to starting it. Maybe you should license *that* from U Chicago or his heirs.) The word search could also help with associating traditional and simplfied characters, by showing you a string in one character set and a grid in the other.
Character writing practice screen. Of course, to make this useful you'd have to get a real font.. It would also be nice to have some drills to help me get the SO right.
On an iPad you could just put the parts breakdown on the character info screen. The SOD only needs about a quarter of the screen. Upper left, SOD. Lower left, whole character with breakdown by colors. Click on a part, the info for that part appears on the right, as well as a second SOD for the part. The list of parts should to get in there somehow, though.
On the iPhone, put the SOD in the upper left, visual part breakdown below, and info for each part on the right. Scrap the list. Add some fancy faux-zoom perspective lines from the visual part breakdown to the RHS explanation (just like at the auto parts store) and take a screenshot of *that* for the iTunes store. That's something no other dictionary (*that I know of*) can do, and it shouldn't be hidden behind a secret popup and then a cryptically named button.
BTW, are you *generating* the parts breakdown from the actual character, or did you license a list produced in some country where labour is cheap?
Wait, i thought you were having trouble in the search rankings because you weren't getting *downloaded*, which is quite different from being downloaded and deleted with a 1-star rating. I do, BTW, prefer that the developers come up with sensible defaults, but I also don't mind a lot of settings if they're well-explained. And, I want to see the cool features in screenshots, not the boring ones that make you look like everybody else. (Doing a few free apps that are a subset of the main app functionality, like a character breakdown app, might also help drive attention to the main app. I would've downloaded that one even if I already had, say, DianHua, or might've clicked on through to the main app.)
Dude, it's an INCH. Are you using one of those Chinese iPhone Nanos?
I just measured it--the right column is 1x2.25". eStroke uses 1x1" for its SOD, and the other 1x1" for a list of common words. It's the list that's too small on eStroke for iPhone. I bet you could use 1/2x1/2 passably. That's huge compared to an actual written character. When I was first learning (that would be in February I think) the waiters would write something out so I could get the stroke order right, and they weren't writing any bigger than that.
It's not. I change it to 10, and to 120, and still see the same default size. Oh, hmm, after a relaunch it changes. 120 pt font is PLENTY big enough for SOD. But I can't adjust the English without affecting the Chinese. And, maybe you should just animate the characters in the RH panel, since they're there already.
I think it might need a Web- or Mac-based settings changer.
True. In restaurants you often see them vertically. If I still had to write on paper, I would write them that way, since my sloppy handwriting doesn't get the sub-components close enough horizontally. BTW, that might be a nice thing to add to the default portrait FSHWR, a wider input area so you could sprawl
Sliding would be fine in the 1x1" SOD field. Just slide to see the next character. But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by making the headword accessible through character info.
<nod> I'm thinking of, for example, using a cheap webcam or USB microscope with the camera connector kit, or repurposing someone else's hardware. I could certainly see Apple supporting a dock connector camera for FaceTime, for example. I haven't heard of anyone using the camera kit that way, but it doesn't seem impossible.
Yes, exactly. I know I looked that damn thing up before, and I know I can't ever get Apple recognizer to get it right even though I'm drawing it right. 'bai' (?!? WTF) and 'ma' are in this category. BTW, is there a "saved searches" item? I don't see anything other than the history, which isn't exactly what I want.
True enough. And if you were tracking that, you'd know exactly how many people successfully find it.
True for actual search results (though of course it would be opt in in which case it isn't violating anything.) But the average length of the average search would help with figuring out, for example, how much space you should reserve for displaying it at your chosen default font size (or, what font size lets you display it in the allotted space, more likely.)
Perhaps. I was an alpha tester for Eudora, but I think all users were asked if they were willing to have their usage statistics sent to the mothership. I expect you would get a mostly unbiased cross-section.
Yeah, right. You should talk to Steve Dorner about that. You'll be coding for MONTHS just to implement what I've already suggested, for which BTW I'd be happy to accept a complimentary full license.
Or maybe you just have a twisted sense of 'fun'. =
~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
I just found an Apple text entry bug from Mac OS 9 or earlier (and all versions of OS X) is still present on iOS 3.2. Try to bring the cursor before the 'B' in the next paragraph. If the bug is real, you won't be able to do that, so you can't paste at the beginning of the line. Now put it in the blank line and try to move it forward. Just like in OS 9 with arrow keys, it moves to the space after the B. Think about that when you ask Apple to fix a bug for you.
[
BTW, one of the other tools I've found useful ion helping to recognise characters is "Chinese Word Search Pro" which can be limited to food and drink terms. (By drink they mean flavored coffees, which is really annoying to have to deal with while playing the game.) I wonder if something like that would be a useful adjunct to flashcards (which I never use because I would have to write them--nobody seems to have a dictionary of food words except the late James McCawley, and while I aspire to typing every entry in _The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters_ into my iPad, I never actually get around to starting it. Maybe you should license *that* from U Chicago or his heirs.) The word search could also help with associating traditional and simplfied characters, by showing you a string in one character set and a grid in the other.
mikelove said:
Character writing practice screen. Of course, to make this useful you'd have to get a real font.
. It would also be nice to have some drills to help me get the SO right.mikelove said:
On an iPad you could just put the parts breakdown on the character info screen. The SOD only needs about a quarter of the screen. Upper left, SOD. Lower left, whole character with breakdown by colors. Click on a part, the info for that part appears on the right, as well as a second SOD for the part. The list of parts should to get in there somehow, though.
On the iPhone, put the SOD in the upper left, visual part breakdown below, and info for each part on the right. Scrap the list. Add some fancy faux-zoom perspective lines from the visual part breakdown to the RHS explanation (just like at the auto parts store) and take a screenshot of *that* for the iTunes store. That's something no other dictionary (*that I know of*) can do, and it shouldn't be hidden behind a secret popup and then a cryptically named button.
BTW, are you *generating* the parts breakdown from the actual character, or did you license a list produced in some country where labour is cheap?
mikelove said:
Wait, i thought you were having trouble in the search rankings because you weren't getting *downloaded*, which is quite different from being downloaded and deleted with a 1-star rating. I do, BTW, prefer that the developers come up with sensible defaults, but I also don't mind a lot of settings if they're well-explained. And, I want to see the cool features in screenshots, not the boring ones that make you look like everybody else. (Doing a few free apps that are a subset of the main app functionality, like a character breakdown app, might also help drive attention to the main app. I would've downloaded that one even if I already had, say, DianHua, or might've clicked on through to the main app.)
mikelove said:
Dude, it's an INCH. Are you using one of those Chinese iPhone Nanos?
I just measured it--the right column is 1x2.25". eStroke uses 1x1" for its SOD, and the other 1x1" for a list of common words. It's the list that's too small on eStroke for iPhone. I bet you could use 1/2x1/2 passably. That's huge compared to an actual written character. When I was first learning (that would be in February I think) the waiters would write something out so I could get the stroke order right, and they weren't writing any bigger than that.
mikelove said:
It's not. I change it to 10, and to 120, and still see the same default size. Oh, hmm, after a relaunch it changes. 120 pt font is PLENTY big enough for SOD. But I can't adjust the English without affecting the Chinese. And, maybe you should just animate the characters in the RH panel, since they're there already.
mikelove said:
I think it might need a Web- or Mac-based settings changer.
mikelove said:
True. In restaurants you often see them vertically.
If I still had to write on paper, I would write them that way, since my sloppy handwriting doesn't get the sub-components close enough horizontally. BTW, that might be a nice thing to add to the default portrait FSHWR, a wider input area so you could sprawl mikelove said:
Sliding would be fine in the 1x1" SOD field. Just slide to see the next character. But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by making the headword accessible through character info.
mikelove said:
<nod> I'm thinking of, for example, using a cheap webcam or USB microscope with the camera connector kit, or repurposing someone else's hardware. I could certainly see Apple supporting a dock connector camera for FaceTime, for example. I haven't heard of anyone using the camera kit that way, but it doesn't seem impossible.
mikelove said:
Yes, exactly. I know I looked that damn thing up before, and I know I can't ever get Apple recognizer to get it right even though I'm drawing it right. 'bai' (?!? WTF) and 'ma' are in this category. BTW, is there a "saved searches" item? I don't see anything other than the history, which isn't exactly what I want.
mikelove said:
True enough. And if you were tracking that, you'd know exactly how many people successfully find it.
mikelove said:
True for actual search results (though of course it would be opt in in which case it isn't violating anything.) But the average length of the average search would help with figuring out, for example, how much space you should reserve for displaying it at your chosen default font size (or, what font size lets you display it in the allotted space, more likely.)
mikelove said:
Perhaps. I was an alpha tester for Eudora, but I think all users were asked if they were willing to have their usage statistics sent to the mothership. I expect you would get a mostly unbiased cross-section.
mikelove said:
Yeah, right. You should talk to Steve Dorner about that. You'll be coding for MONTHS just to implement what I've already suggested, for which BTW I'd be happy to accept a complimentary full license.
Or maybe you just have a twisted sense of 'fun'. =
~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Pleco feels way too techie, I wish it'd take some design cues from apps like iBooks, KanjiPop and aNote. iPhone users in particular are more likely to care for appearances, I tend to imagine Android as the techie device where design aesthetics are less pretty and more techie. It is run by Google after all and they clearly don't care too much about design aesthetics, in direct contrast with Apple where it's a focus of theirs.
Part of my interest in Japanese/Chinese (as with plenty of my language hobby mates, even more so in girls), comes from the love of aesthetics and beautiful handwriting. Back when I tried first year Chinese at Uni in 06/07 or so, there were 300 students in the lecture where the bulk would be caucasian girls, largely those interested in culture, arts and language. Sure there are plenty of techie kinda guys interested in anime and other oriental things and the like but very few of them ever venture into the language learning side of things.
From the very start I found Pleco techie looking, but now after a session of iBooks, aNote or KanjiPop (among other apps) and then switching over to Pleco, it can be quite hard spending much time there week-in-week-out, and that's really not what you want with a study/reading app. If people are to spend significant time in the app and make significant investments as far as iPhone addon prices go they are gonna want a more commercial nice looking app reflecting Chinese culture in it’s look. Imagine watching a nice looking artsy epic Chinese martial art drama/movie, and then switching to some techie feeling system for a dictionary.
If I feel this way I can only imagine what it's like for plenty of others who tend to get into language study. I’m sure a lot of these people just don’t bother posting feedback about anything. There are a bunch of Chinese studying people who I’ve mentioned Pleco to and saw them install on the spot infront of me, but then maybe 2-3 months later in basic “ohh hows your chinese going..?”, any mention of using Pleco for my study and half of them have no idea what app I’m taking about. The current green look although colour customisable doesn’t really cut it, and it’d be nicer if you switch to…
-Image decorations and animations like KanjiPop reflecting Chinese Culture.
-Replace “new folder” and other buttons with more aNote like icons.
-Dump the current colour tweaks system for themes (just the one or even 3-5 or so) of varying colours and culture elements for users to switch between reflecting their personality and keeping them impressed.
-Dump the rigid computer text font and replace with a neat easily-readable handwritten font, the theme designs and handwritten text should be in harmony. Compare the reading experience of iBooks and Pleco and you’ll find the Pleco text isn’t nice on the eyes at all despite iBooks also coming standard with a non-handwritten printed font.
So basically, I reckon a proper theme(s) replacing your current editable colour scheme system should be as big a project as any one of these new dictionaries or features you’ve been adding.
Cheers
Pleco feels way too techie, I wish it'd take some design cues from apps like iBooks, KanjiPop and aNote. iPhone users in particular are more likely to care for appearances, I tend to imagine Android as the techie device where design aesthetics are less pretty and more techie. It is run by Google after all and they clearly don't care too much about design aesthetics, in direct contrast with Apple where it's a focus of theirs.
Part of my interest in Japanese/Chinese (as with plenty of my language hobby mates, even more so in girls), comes from the love of aesthetics and beautiful handwriting. Back when I tried first year Chinese at Uni in 06/07 or so, there were 300 students in the lecture where the bulk would be caucasian girls, largely those interested in culture, arts and language. Sure there are plenty of techie kinda guys interested in anime and other oriental things and the like but very few of them ever venture into the language learning side of things.
From the very start I found Pleco techie looking, but now after a session of iBooks, aNote or KanjiPop (among other apps) and then switching over to Pleco, it can be quite hard spending much time there week-in-week-out, and that's really not what you want with a study/reading app. If people are to spend significant time in the app and make significant investments as far as iPhone addon prices go they are gonna want a more commercial nice looking app reflecting Chinese culture in it’s look. Imagine watching a nice looking artsy epic Chinese martial art drama/movie, and then switching to some techie feeling system for a dictionary.
If I feel this way I can only imagine what it's like for plenty of others who tend to get into language study. I’m sure a lot of these people just don’t bother posting feedback about anything. There are a bunch of Chinese studying people who I’ve mentioned Pleco to and saw them install on the spot infront of me, but then maybe 2-3 months later in basic “ohh hows your chinese going..?”, any mention of using Pleco for my study and half of them have no idea what app I’m taking about. The current green look although colour customisable doesn’t really cut it, and it’d be nicer if you switch to…
-Image decorations and animations like KanjiPop reflecting Chinese Culture.
-Replace “new folder” and other buttons with more aNote like icons.
-Dump the current colour tweaks system for themes (just the one or even 3-5 or so) of varying colours and culture elements for users to switch between reflecting their personality and keeping them impressed.
-Dump the rigid computer text font and replace with a neat easily-readable handwritten font, the theme designs and handwritten text should be in harmony. Compare the reading experience of iBooks and Pleco and you’ll find the Pleco text isn’t nice on the eyes at all despite iBooks also coming standard with a non-handwritten printed font.
So basically, I reckon a proper theme(s) replacing your current editable colour scheme system should be as big a project as any one of these new dictionaries or features you’ve been adding.
Cheers
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Oh and also… could you make the reader more like the book reading experiences of iBooks and Stanza..? Rather than just a down scrolling notepad app kinda experience..? And the skip/previous and rewind/fastford buttons within Reader for moving between words isn’t very seamless, feels as though it’s from Windows Mobile and not taking advantage of the iPhone and needs replacing. How about …
A system where a bar appears at the bottom of the screen upon touching a word and showing it’s definition (just as how the arrows currently appear), and sliding this bar left or right would move the cursor left or right from one vocabulary item to the next as the arrows do, where you could also show some kind of indicators with say 语言学家where this full compound would appear even though a smaller word 语言 word is contained, this indicator would allow users to switch between seeing the full word and words contained within.
As for cleaning up Reader and making buttons more accessible, just as how aNote has the folder view button that pops up the variety of views available, you could have such an icon to the right of the mentioned bar, pressing would show all of the icons you currently have listed at the top of Reader’s defintion mode such as search, audio, add flashcard etc. This would be much tidier than current and it’s nicer having all these options at the bottom rather than having to move across to the top of the screen. I’ve never liked having audio at the top of the screen, feels like a nuisance having a commonly used button so high. I just love to hit a button beside the bar, move over to audio and release my finger from the screen, as quick and easy as possibe without having to adjust my grip up to the top of the iPhone and back.
Also, there are a bunch of free online book sites such as (http://www.17k.com) where I download the text from and transfer over to Pleco’s Reader, could you make a more integrated experiences with one of these sites? Users would love more modern novels for use with Reader, yet only the techie are gonna bother transfer from one of these sites to Pleco. Probably not many beginners/intermediate readers are gonna be going straight into those Chinese classics you’ve got listed. As with iBooks, manual book file transfers should be left more to the side for those needing, while the mainstream have the nicer store option. Side-by-side novels with both the Chinese/English as can be seen in bookshops would be nice as well, splitting the two languages into two panes, great for those at lower levels requiring comprehension aid.
Between the themes, Reader and OCR enhancements mentioned… Pleco would definetly be an absolute killer app and can’t imagine many having any reason to look elsewhere
Oh and also… could you make the reader more like the book reading experiences of iBooks and Stanza..? Rather than just a down scrolling notepad app kinda experience..? And the skip/previous and rewind/fastford buttons within Reader for moving between words isn’t very seamless, feels as though it’s from Windows Mobile and not taking advantage of the iPhone and needs replacing. How about …
A system where a bar appears at the bottom of the screen upon touching a word and showing it’s definition (just as how the arrows currently appear), and sliding this bar left or right would move the cursor left or right from one vocabulary item to the next as the arrows do, where you could also show some kind of indicators with say 语言学家where this full compound would appear even though a smaller word 语言 word is contained, this indicator would allow users to switch between seeing the full word and words contained within.
As for cleaning up Reader and making buttons more accessible, just as how aNote has the folder view button that pops up the variety of views available, you could have such an icon to the right of the mentioned bar, pressing would show all of the icons you currently have listed at the top of Reader’s defintion mode such as search, audio, add flashcard etc. This would be much tidier than current and it’s nicer having all these options at the bottom rather than having to move across to the top of the screen. I’ve never liked having audio at the top of the screen, feels like a nuisance having a commonly used button so high. I just love to hit a button beside the bar, move over to audio and release my finger from the screen, as quick and easy as possibe without having to adjust my grip up to the top of the iPhone and back.
Also, there are a bunch of free online book sites such as (http://www.17k.com) where I download the text from and transfer over to Pleco’s Reader, could you make a more integrated experiences with one of these sites? Users would love more modern novels for use with Reader, yet only the techie are gonna bother transfer from one of these sites to Pleco. Probably not many beginners/intermediate readers are gonna be going straight into those Chinese classics you’ve got listed. As with iBooks, manual book file transfers should be left more to the side for those needing, while the mainstream have the nicer store option. Side-by-side novels with both the Chinese/English as can be seen in bookshops would be nice as well, splitting the two languages into two panes, great for those at lower levels requiring comprehension aid.
Between the themes, Reader and OCR enhancements mentioned… Pleco would definetly be an absolute killer app and can’t imagine many having any reason to look elsewhere
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Hey.
quick question about default dictionary.
I haven't found it anywhere, but is there a way to jump back to the default dictionary.
when u have too much of them and start scrolling and u want to get back to the default one, it would b nice to be able to get there fast (double click on the dictionary button maybe?)
10x.
Hey.
quick question about default dictionary.
I haven't found it anywhere, but is there a way to jump back to the default dictionary.
when u have too much of them and start scrolling and u want to get back to the default one, it would b nice to be able to get there fast (double click on the dictionary button maybe?)
10x.
radioman
状元
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Is it possible to make it so at if you press on an English word in the reader, or within a definition, that English word can be looked up? At least by initiating a full text search? I think I broached this in the past, but I'm putting it out there again.
Is it possible to make it so at if you press on an English word in the reader, or within a definition, that English word can be looked up? At least by initiating a full text search? I think I broached this in the past, but I'm putting it out there again.
character
状元
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
* unless I've munged the settings somehow. Compare PLC and ABC results for "shi", "xia", and "xiang" -- ABC puts the expected character at the top, PLC does not in my install.
I don't have CC, but PLC (which I'd been using) doesn't seem to be ordered by frequency.* I will switch to ABC. If it's not already, IMO a dictionary which has "single-character Pinyin searches" return frequency-ordered results should be the default for the product as part of the plan to be friendly to new users of Pleco.mikelove said:
* unless I've munged the settings somehow. Compare PLC and ABC results for "shi", "xia", and "xiang" -- ABC puts the expected character at the top, PLC does not in my install.
character said:
I would think it wouldn't be too painful to code, so perhaps test it in some future beta? Or make a poll about it? I personally find that buttons work much better than scroll bars/d-pads on the iPhone.mikelove said:
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
A few more quick things ( on iPad)
If the manual weren't hidden behind the fan, people would be more likely to read it.
The manual should save it's state. Every setting should be discussed in the manual ( probably already true) and every manual entry should include the option to configure that setting *right now* and without losing the manual state. On the iPad there's no reason not to split the screen to do this.
A few more quick things ( on iPad)
If the manual weren't hidden behind the fan, people would be more likely to read it.
The manual should save it's state. Every setting should be discussed in the manual ( probably already true) and every manual entry should include the option to configure that setting *right now* and without losing the manual state. On the iPad there's no reason not to split the screen to do this.
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
Well the inter-device Bluetooth issue is a considerably bigger deal, especially as more people start trying to build cool apps that involve communication between iPads and iPhones - direct TCP connections over WiFI / Rendezvous work well enough, but better Bluetooth is still vital.
What do you mean that you'd "have to write them"? There aren't existing dictionary entries for any of the words you want to study? I've had a few people mention that McCawley book but I haven't taken a look at it yet - have to pick up a copy.
We do have a stroke order test, it just involves tapping on strokes instead of drawing them. So even with the bold option, the font in our stroke order screen is totally unusable to you as it stands now?
I suppose there's really not that much of a reason to even have separate tabs in Char Info on iPad, actually, though some people seem to like the giant stroke order diagram.
LOT of work, but that would be a pretty cool way to do it... and we actually use a single (licensed) database for both features, reusing parts, which is why we've been able to squeeze stroke order diagrams for 20,000+ characters into a < 3 MB file.
It's neither of those - we got as high as #12 in reference apps after the Engadget bit on OCR but we were still way down in the search results. The problem is basically that the ranking system is penalizing us in some way we haven't figured out; best guess at the moment is that it involves total cumulative downloads rather than the last few days' worth of them, and in that we're at a disadvantage relative to other apps that were released before ours.
OCR may be a good first spinoff app, though a more advanced character breakdown system might make sense too.
Sorry, I thought you were talking about jamming four characters abreast in that column - this makes more sense.
Could - not a trivial bit of programming, though.
That's probably in the pie-in-the-sky category I'm sorry to say, though we might eventually implement a settings backup / restore feature at least.
You're talking about iPad now, right? Not sure how we'd do that on an iPhone, unless by "input area" you mean something other than the box into which you draw characters.
You'd go to a "Character Info" screen for a dictionary entry that would display info for all of the characters in its headword, with an easy way of flipping between them to examine them one by one.
That one seems unlikely - Apple's not going to want anyone using anything but their cameras for FaceTime on an iPhone at least - but there ought to be some standard hardware out there for this, if not now then soon for a variety of vertical-market apps (iPhone POS systems, e.g.).
Not at the moment - you can review recent searches (and we're increasing the number it keeps in 2.2) but no way to save them - not sure where we can jam another command in the main dictionary search interface at this point, though it could be a customized-toolbar-only thing I suppose.
I suppose - there are a lot of other concerns at play there, though, aesthetics and average finger-pointing accuracy and so on.
Really? I'd think at the very least that long-time users who knew / trusted us would be a lot more likely to opt in than people new to the whole Pleco experience.
Well we'll probably end up implementing 1/10th of it, but still good stuff
(have to run, will respond to other posts in this thread later)
Entropy said:
Well the inter-device Bluetooth issue is a considerably bigger deal, especially as more people start trying to build cool apps that involve communication between iPads and iPhones - direct TCP connections over WiFI / Rendezvous work well enough, but better Bluetooth is still vital.
Entropy said:
What do you mean that you'd "have to write them"? There aren't existing dictionary entries for any of the words you want to study? I've had a few people mention that McCawley book but I haven't taken a look at it yet - have to pick up a copy.
Entropy said:
We do have a stroke order test, it just involves tapping on strokes instead of drawing them. So even with the bold option, the font in our stroke order screen is totally unusable to you as it stands now?
Entropy said:
I suppose there's really not that much of a reason to even have separate tabs in Char Info on iPad, actually, though some people seem to like the giant stroke order diagram.
Entropy said:
LOT of work, but that would be a pretty cool way to do it... and we actually use a single (licensed) database for both features, reusing parts, which is why we've been able to squeeze stroke order diagrams for 20,000+ characters into a < 3 MB file.
Entropy said:
It's neither of those - we got as high as #12 in reference apps after the Engadget bit on OCR but we were still way down in the search results. The problem is basically that the ranking system is penalizing us in some way we haven't figured out; best guess at the moment is that it involves total cumulative downloads rather than the last few days' worth of them, and in that we're at a disadvantage relative to other apps that were released before ours.
OCR may be a good first spinoff app, though a more advanced character breakdown system might make sense too.
Entropy said:
Sorry, I thought you were talking about jamming four characters abreast in that column - this makes more sense.
Entropy said:
Could - not a trivial bit of programming, though.
Entropy said:
That's probably in the pie-in-the-sky category I'm sorry to say, though we might eventually implement a settings backup / restore feature at least.
Entropy said:
You're talking about iPad now, right? Not sure how we'd do that on an iPhone, unless by "input area" you mean something other than the box into which you draw characters.
Entropy said:
You'd go to a "Character Info" screen for a dictionary entry that would display info for all of the characters in its headword, with an easy way of flipping between them to examine them one by one.
Entropy said:
That one seems unlikely - Apple's not going to want anyone using anything but their cameras for FaceTime on an iPhone at least - but there ought to be some standard hardware out there for this, if not now then soon for a variety of vertical-market apps (iPhone POS systems, e.g.).
Entropy said:
Not at the moment - you can review recent searches (and we're increasing the number it keeps in 2.2) but no way to save them - not sure where we can jam another command in the main dictionary search interface at this point, though it could be a customized-toolbar-only thing I suppose.
Entropy said:
I suppose - there are a lot of other concerns at play there, though, aesthetics and average finger-pointing accuracy and so on.
Entropy said:
Really? I'd think at the very least that long-time users who knew / trusted us would be a lot more likely to opt in than people new to the whole Pleco experience.
Entropy said:
Well we'll probably end up implementing 1/10th of it, but still good stuff
(have to run, will respond to other posts in this thread later)
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
*nod* I was mostly trying to document that one before it slipped my mind.
I assume there are, but I'd have to actually find them. Let's see... 夫妻肺片 Nope. Despite being on the menu of every restaurant I eat at, there's no entry for this. And that's the problem. Presumably I could store these four characters as a flashcard, but I can't just look it up, click, and have it added to my flashcard pile for future testing. In theory an append to pasteboard/append to something else would help me construct it, but I'd still have to construct it.
Note that *I* know what it means, and only want to use the flashcards to help me learn to recognize it quickly, instead of saying "I know that one, let me look it up" and possibly (more and more probably) to learn the associated Pinyin, though I still think people should learn to write. But other users will actually need the definition. And there's also context--when *I* see 螺丝包 I want to learn "shredded conch dumplings' not "bag of screws." Not that there *are* any shredded conch dumplings, not yet anyway, but there WILL be! =
You're kidding, right? I just got another spare copy at the Strand last month, which I guess doesn't help you much since you're in NZ and I got it first.
Oh, that's possibly interesting, but I don't know how to find it. But in fact I misspoke, I mean a handwriting quality test. IOW, how legible is my scribble? It seems you could leverage the OCR engine for this--the better I write, the fewer matches. Apple's HWR seems to work this way, too (the better you write, the better the match) so maybe you could leverage that.
It's much better with the bold, which once again appears only after I relaunch the app. And turning on greyscale helps with a big problem--how do I figure out which stroke the ugly lumpy ends belong to? BTW, the black end of the scale is almost indistinguishable to me--I think you need to have wider variation in those greys (perhaps as yet another option.)
But it's still *really* ugly compared either with eStroke, or with the basic fonts used in printed material. eStroke's "display font" style, while less helpful when dealing with printed material, does shed some light on handwritten Chinese, which even McCawley claimed he wasn't able to master.
Give that a button of its own.
I only meant a static "perspective line" thing, to show which part is currently listed. Thus the use of the word 'faux'. But on iPad (and probably on iPhone) the current list could just go on the right, colored to match the parts diagram, and you could tap the part you want to zoom to that part of the list. BTW, it's not unheard of for an app to auto-rotate when it wants to use landscape. Just look at Google Maps.
Since what you really want is to drive people to buy add-ons, it's not clear how many spin-off apps you want. Ideally, only one that people buy for $5, and then get sucked into the full app and add-ons.
I was thinking of a 2x2 grid in an inch square pane. But scrolling also works.
Due to Apple file transfer limitations? *Something* has to be done to make the settings more informative than they are, and easier to find. Spotlight search?
Yep.
I turned on something that lets me add words to a list. A list I can't figure out how to access. :-/
I think you'd be surprised at the kinds of things people willingly opt-into. :-/
Ah, but I'm just getting started. 10% isn't bad at all. So this is worth 10% off on paid purchases?
(A serious note on purchase price: it might be good to have a $50 upgrade from the $50 bundle to the $100 one, so that people don't put off their purchases waiting until they can afford the whole caboodle.)
~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
mikelove said:
*nod* I was mostly trying to document that one before it slipped my mind.
mikelove said:
I assume there are, but I'd have to actually find them. Let's see... 夫妻肺片 Nope. Despite being on the menu of every restaurant I eat at, there's no entry for this. And that's the problem. Presumably I could store these four characters as a flashcard, but I can't just look it up, click, and have it added to my flashcard pile for future testing. In theory an append to pasteboard/append to something else would help me construct it, but I'd still have to construct it.
Note that *I* know what it means, and only want to use the flashcards to help me learn to recognize it quickly, instead of saying "I know that one, let me look it up" and possibly (more and more probably) to learn the associated Pinyin, though I still think people should learn to write. But other users will actually need the definition. And there's also context--when *I* see 螺丝包 I want to learn "shredded conch dumplings' not "bag of screws." Not that there *are* any shredded conch dumplings, not yet anyway, but there WILL be! =
mikelove said:
You're kidding, right? I just got another spare copy at the Strand last month, which I guess doesn't help you much since you're in NZ and I got it first.
mikelove said:
Oh, that's possibly interesting, but I don't know how to find it. But in fact I misspoke, I mean a handwriting quality test. IOW, how legible is my scribble? It seems you could leverage the OCR engine for this--the better I write, the fewer matches. Apple's HWR seems to work this way, too (the better you write, the better the match) so maybe you could leverage that.
mikelove said:
It's much better with the bold, which once again appears only after I relaunch the app. And turning on greyscale helps with a big problem--how do I figure out which stroke the ugly lumpy ends belong to? BTW, the black end of the scale is almost indistinguishable to me--I think you need to have wider variation in those greys (perhaps as yet another option.)
But it's still *really* ugly compared either with eStroke, or with the basic fonts used in printed material. eStroke's "display font" style, while less helpful when dealing with printed material, does shed some light on handwritten Chinese, which even McCawley claimed he wasn't able to master.
mikelove said:
Give that a button of its own.
Entropy said:
mikelove said:
I only meant a static "perspective line" thing, to show which part is currently listed. Thus the use of the word 'faux'. But on iPad (and probably on iPhone) the current list could just go on the right, colored to match the parts diagram, and you could tap the part you want to zoom to that part of the list. BTW, it's not unheard of for an app to auto-rotate when it wants to use landscape. Just look at Google Maps.
mikelove said:
Since what you really want is to drive people to buy add-ons, it's not clear how many spin-off apps you want. Ideally, only one that people buy for $5, and then get sucked into the full app and add-ons.
mikelove said:
I was thinking of a 2x2 grid in an inch square pane. But scrolling also works.
mikelove said:
Due to Apple file transfer limitations? *Something* has to be done to make the settings more informative than they are, and easier to find. Spotlight search?
mikelove said:
Yep.
mikelove said:
I turned on something that lets me add words to a list. A list I can't figure out how to access. :-/
mikelove said:
I think you'd be surprised at the kinds of things people willingly opt-into. :-/
mikelove said:Well we'll probably end up implementing 1/10th of it, but still good stuff
Ah, but I'm just getting started. 10% isn't bad at all.
So this is worth 10% off on paid purchases?(A serious note on purchase price: it might be good to have a $50 upgrade from the $50 bundle to the $100 one, so that people don't put off their purchases waiting until they can afford the whole caboodle.)
~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>
Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements
I like the idea of at least going a bit beyond colors to actual image "themes," but animations I'm not so sure about - we have to balance aesthetics with the fact that people spend a lot of time in this app, and while complicated UI animations may be attractive and fun at first, they can get aggravating if you're seeing them 50 times a day; we've had a number of complaints even just about the simple sliding effect when you tap on a search result to go into the full-screen definition.
What do you think of the UI from our flashcard test screen? Would that maybe be more what you're looking for, at least if we made the color / background image customizable? And could you give me some more specific examples of where you'd like image decorations / what sort of decorations you'd like to see?
Which other buttons? In general I feel like icons are best limited to screens that people use a lot, especially in an app like ours with such a bewildering number of different interfaces - I suppose a picture of a folder with a + next to it is fairly universal, though.
Having some premade color schemes other than day and night might make sense, but since we've already got a color picker I think we might as well at least keep giving people the option to customize the color of each element - there are all kinds of special cases (color blindness, e.g.) where a customized color scheme would be useful.
A handwritten font would be a little dicey since there isn't one built into iOS - we'd have to expensively license one to integrate it into our app, or go to a ton of programming effort to make it possible for users to install their own (not a feature iOS supports officially).
Those buttons for moving between words are designed to deal with the fact that it's very difficult to position a finger accurately on an iPhone screen - Apple's built-in text selection system is borderline unusable for big-fingered people. I know it seems crude compared to some cool multitouch / selection loupe / etc thing, but sometimes the old solutions are still the best ones.
And I suppose we could add an option for flippable pages, but I worry that that won't work well in our case for two reasons:
1) Chinese words can wrap around to multiple lines; and
2) When reading text in any foreign language, it's often necessary to read over an entire sentence several times in order to grasp its meaning, and sometimes even to re-read an entire paragraph a few times.
This is why we default to continuous-scrolling text; we want to make sure that people can get the entire segment of text that they're interested in on the screen at the same time.
This might help address the line-wrapping problem 1) above at least - bit like a system we used for that in our old Palm/WM document reader, actually. We do allow switching between the full word / partial word using the |-> and |-< buttons now, though there've been a lot of requests for a handle-dragging alternative.
So you'd rather not have to switch bars, in other words? I guess we could have an option for a "menu" button in the middle of the current arrow bar (there's easily room for a fifth button there), but I think the current two-bar system would still have to be the default - discoverability is very important and it's hard enough for people to find useful screens like Char Info without burying them in a menu.
We actually have reached out to a few of them but we haven't had much luck so far - it's a little difficult because we need to make sure everything's entirely on the up-and-up copyright-wise. Though I agree we need an easier way for people to get texts into the reader - perhaps we should explore licensing a set of graded reading materials from someone.
Thanks for the feedback!
You can tap-hold on the button and then tap on the dictionary that you want - double-tapping is a little dicey on iPhone, but I suppose we could add an option to have that tap-hold trigger a return to the default dictionary instead of popping up a menu.
Possible, but I continue to worry about mistaken screen taps (getting English when you wanted some adjacent Chinese characters) in this case - whatever we do has to at least have the same interface as a Chinese popup search. The "search for" button in the command bar for our new tap-hold selection system in 2.2 should be a pretty good solution for this, though.
They don't stick the single most common character without regard to tone on top like ABC does, but they do sort characters with the same tone by frequency at least.
Maybe, but I think there could also be reason to consider some more fundamental changes in the way we handle the interface for Pinyin searches; for example, we could really use our own customized Pinyin keyboard, one that was shuangpin and supported some degree of error correction / commonly-confused-syllable-combining e.g. And we could certainly consider offering an option to sort toneless Pinyin searches by frequency without regard to tone, which would seem to pretty much eliminate the need for a button to change syllables anyway (since if you know the correct tone you can simply type that in, and if you don't know it the reason you're paging through rather than scrolling is because you expect the word to be near the top for some particular tone).
Granted, but then we're talking about jamming yet another button into the UI.
It already does save the current page, though we really need to break it up into more, smaller pages. A split screen for viewing settings + the manual is interesting, but I think I'd rather just add an (i) button to each Settings option that popped up an explanation for what that particular option does.
That is an embarrassing omission - not sure why it isn't in CC-CEDICT at least - but =aside from licensing more dictionaries there isn't much we can do on that - can't magically generate content that isn't already there.
I'm in a lot of places - can probably order one from UofC press anyway.
Flashcard Testing / Test type = Stroke Order. Handwriting quality test would be dicey because poor handwriting doesn't always correlate with inaccurate handwriting, and because the templates used by our handwriting recognizer were designed to deal with badly-written characters - statistically you might sometimes even get a closer match probability with a badly-written character than a well-written one.
It's a pretty generic SongTi font - Wenlin uses something almost identical in-app for all of their character rendering (and stroke order diagrams) and I haven't heard a whole lot of complaints on that. The design of the character database certainly might support replacing the individual strokes with prettier / more calligraphic ones following the same basic start / end / inflection points, though - I guess I'm just not as aesthetically offended by the stroke order diagrams as a lot of people seem to be, they serve their functional purpose just fine. Would you find even a font that used thick, homogenous-width lines in place of strokes preferable to the current one? (that would be really easy to implement)
It's an undocumented API - Apple lets Google get away with all sorts of things, but there are many many documented reports of other apps getting rejected for forced screen rotation.
That would be the idea, yes. I agree for generic features like OCR it would be best to limit the number, but focused spin-off apps that marketed themselves to different user groups (a bilingual Bible reader, e.g. - very easy to build using our existing document reader code, though it seems like to make everyone happy with that we'd also need to license a whole bunch of different Bibles) might be a way to reach some people who'd be unlikely to be interested in the full app.
Only readable if you've bought the document reader add-on, strangely enough - it's an awkward feature left over from the days before we supported flashcards which we plan to drop as soon as we add a basic flashcard (or flashcard-based 'word list') system to our free demo version.
The $100 bundle is missing the NWP dictionary from the $50 bundle, so it would have to be a $60 upgrade or else everybody would buy the two $50 ones to save money.
sladep said:
I like the idea of at least going a bit beyond colors to actual image "themes," but animations I'm not so sure about - we have to balance aesthetics with the fact that people spend a lot of time in this app, and while complicated UI animations may be attractive and fun at first, they can get aggravating if you're seeing them 50 times a day; we've had a number of complaints even just about the simple sliding effect when you tap on a search result to go into the full-screen definition.
What do you think of the UI from our flashcard test screen? Would that maybe be more what you're looking for, at least if we made the color / background image customizable? And could you give me some more specific examples of where you'd like image decorations / what sort of decorations you'd like to see?
sladep said:
Which other buttons? In general I feel like icons are best limited to screens that people use a lot, especially in an app like ours with such a bewildering number of different interfaces - I suppose a picture of a folder with a + next to it is fairly universal, though.
sladep said:
Having some premade color schemes other than day and night might make sense, but since we've already got a color picker I think we might as well at least keep giving people the option to customize the color of each element - there are all kinds of special cases (color blindness, e.g.) where a customized color scheme would be useful.
sladep said:
A handwritten font would be a little dicey since there isn't one built into iOS - we'd have to expensively license one to integrate it into our app, or go to a ton of programming effort to make it possible for users to install their own (not a feature iOS supports officially).
sladep said:
Those buttons for moving between words are designed to deal with the fact that it's very difficult to position a finger accurately on an iPhone screen - Apple's built-in text selection system is borderline unusable for big-fingered people. I know it seems crude compared to some cool multitouch / selection loupe / etc thing, but sometimes the old solutions are still the best ones.
And I suppose we could add an option for flippable pages, but I worry that that won't work well in our case for two reasons:
1) Chinese words can wrap around to multiple lines; and
2) When reading text in any foreign language, it's often necessary to read over an entire sentence several times in order to grasp its meaning, and sometimes even to re-read an entire paragraph a few times.
This is why we default to continuous-scrolling text; we want to make sure that people can get the entire segment of text that they're interested in on the screen at the same time.
sladep said:
This might help address the line-wrapping problem 1) above at least - bit like a system we used for that in our old Palm/WM document reader, actually. We do allow switching between the full word / partial word using the |-> and |-< buttons now, though there've been a lot of requests for a handle-dragging alternative.
sladep said:
So you'd rather not have to switch bars, in other words? I guess we could have an option for a "menu" button in the middle of the current arrow bar (there's easily room for a fifth button there), but I think the current two-bar system would still have to be the default - discoverability is very important and it's hard enough for people to find useful screens like Char Info without burying them in a menu.
sladep said:
We actually have reached out to a few of them but we haven't had much luck so far - it's a little difficult because we need to make sure everything's entirely on the up-and-up copyright-wise. Though I agree we need an easier way for people to get texts into the reader - perhaps we should explore licensing a set of graded reading materials from someone.
Thanks for the feedback!
yuvalcho said:
You can tap-hold on the button and then tap on the dictionary that you want - double-tapping is a little dicey on iPhone, but I suppose we could add an option to have that tap-hold trigger a return to the default dictionary instead of popping up a menu.
radioman said:
Possible, but I continue to worry about mistaken screen taps (getting English when you wanted some adjacent Chinese characters) in this case - whatever we do has to at least have the same interface as a Chinese popup search. The "search for" button in the command bar for our new tap-hold selection system in 2.2 should be a pretty good solution for this, though.
character said:
They don't stick the single most common character without regard to tone on top like ABC does, but they do sort characters with the same tone by frequency at least.
character said:
Maybe, but I think there could also be reason to consider some more fundamental changes in the way we handle the interface for Pinyin searches; for example, we could really use our own customized Pinyin keyboard, one that was shuangpin and supported some degree of error correction / commonly-confused-syllable-combining e.g. And we could certainly consider offering an option to sort toneless Pinyin searches by frequency without regard to tone, which would seem to pretty much eliminate the need for a button to change syllables anyway (since if you know the correct tone you can simply type that in, and if you don't know it the reason you're paging through rather than scrolling is because you expect the word to be near the top for some particular tone).
Entropy said:
Granted, but then we're talking about jamming yet another button into the UI.
Entropy said:
It already does save the current page, though we really need to break it up into more, smaller pages. A split screen for viewing settings + the manual is interesting, but I think I'd rather just add an (i) button to each Settings option that popped up an explanation for what that particular option does.
Entropy said:
That is an embarrassing omission - not sure why it isn't in CC-CEDICT at least - but =aside from licensing more dictionaries there isn't much we can do on that - can't magically generate content that isn't already there.
Entropy said:
I'm in a lot of places
- can probably order one from UofC press anyway.Entropy said:
Flashcard Testing / Test type = Stroke Order. Handwriting quality test would be dicey because poor handwriting doesn't always correlate with inaccurate handwriting, and because the templates used by our handwriting recognizer were designed to deal with badly-written characters - statistically you might sometimes even get a closer match probability with a badly-written character than a well-written one.
Entropy said:
It's a pretty generic SongTi font - Wenlin uses something almost identical in-app for all of their character rendering (and stroke order diagrams) and I haven't heard a whole lot of complaints on that. The design of the character database certainly might support replacing the individual strokes with prettier / more calligraphic ones following the same basic start / end / inflection points, though - I guess I'm just not as aesthetically offended by the stroke order diagrams as a lot of people seem to be, they serve their functional purpose just fine. Would you find even a font that used thick, homogenous-width lines in place of strokes preferable to the current one? (that would be really easy to implement)
Entropy said:
It's an undocumented API - Apple lets Google get away with all sorts of things, but there are many many documented reports of other apps getting rejected for forced screen rotation.
Entropy said:
That would be the idea, yes. I agree for generic features like OCR it would be best to limit the number, but focused spin-off apps that marketed themselves to different user groups (a bilingual Bible reader, e.g. - very easy to build using our existing document reader code, though it seems like to make everyone happy with that we'd also need to license a whole bunch of different Bibles) might be a way to reach some people who'd be unlikely to be interested in the full app.
Entropy said:
Only readable if you've bought the document reader add-on, strangely enough - it's an awkward feature left over from the days before we supported flashcards which we plan to drop as soon as we add a basic flashcard (or flashcard-based 'word list') system to our free demo version.
Entropy said:
The $100 bundle is missing the NWP dictionary from the $50 bundle, so it would have to be a $60 upgrade or else everybody would buy the two $50 ones to save money.